Why WagePilot isn't priced per seat
Per-seat pricing quietly punishes you for growing. Here is the reasoning behind charging a flat rate instead, and the maths that makes it obvious.
Most workforce apps charge per person. Every new hire adds to the bill. It sounds fair (more people, more cost), but look at it from the owner’s chair and it is the opposite of fair.
Per-seat pricing bills you for the wrong thing
The cost to us of one more person on a rota is, to a rounding error, nothing. A row in a database. The value to you of that person is enormous: they are the reason the café opens or the shift is covered. Per-seat pricing charges you the most exactly when you are doing the thing the software is supposed to help with: growing.
Worse, it makes the tool something to ration. We have watched businesses leave casual staff off the system to keep the seat count down, which defeats the entire point: now the rota isn’t the real rota, and the labour-cost number is a fiction.
The maths
WagePilot is a flat £29 a month per site, with unlimited staff. Set that against a typical per-seat tool at around £4 a head:
- Five people: per-seat ~£20 a month. WagePilot: free. (One site, up to five people, is free.)
- Twenty-five people: per-seat ~£100 a month. WagePilot: £29.
- Fifty people: per-seat ~£200 a month. WagePilot: £29, about £2,052 a year back in your pocket.
There is a calculator on the WagePilot page if you want to plug in your own headcount. We would rather you check the arithmetic than take our word for it.
What we give up, and why we don’t mind
Flat pricing means we make less from a fifty-person site than a per-seat competitor does. We are fine with that. We would rather have a business that recommends us because the pricing never punished them, than squeeze every seat and watch them resent the invoice.
It also lines up our interests with yours. Because we don’t earn more when you add people, we have no incentive to push seat counts or upsell tiers you don’t need. Our only way to earn more is to be worth keeping.
The principle underneath
We build and run our own software, so we set the prices, and we set them the way we would want them set for us: simple, flat, and on your side as you grow. Pricing is a product decision, not a growth hack, and a price you never have to think about is a feature.